[Bin] Laden (spoke) of how he used "guerrilla warfare and the war
of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside
the mujaheddin, bled Russia for ten years, until it went
bankrupt." He has compared the United States to the Soviet Union
on numerous occasions -- and these comparisons have been
explicitly economic. For example, in October 2004 bin Laden said
that just as the Arab fighters and Afghan mujaheddin had
destroyed Russia economically, al Qaeda was now doing the same to
the United States, "continuing this policy in bleeding America to
the point of bankruptcy." Similarly, in a September 2007 video
message, bin Laden claimed that "thinkers who study events and
happenings" were now predicting the American empire's collapse.
He gloated, "The mistakes of Brezhnev are being repeated by
Bush."

In the U.S. case, Bin Laden never quite achieved his goal. But he
came very close.
As Ezra Klein points out, the 9/11 attacks led to two long
and very expensive wars, a costly homeland security buildup and a
decade of loose monetary policy. Which in turn caused collateral
economic damage (higher oil prices, subprime lending, etc).

The truth is: bin Laden wrote the playbook for doing battle with
superpowers. The next generation of terrorist leaders will
follow it closely. And, unlike bin Laden, they will likely
have biological
weapons in their arsenal.